Early & Second Renaissance Poetry: Styles, Authors, and Works

The Poetry of the Early Renaissance

• Lyric Educated in Castilian Verse: The best representative was Cristóbal de Castillejo.
• Traditional and Lyrical Ballads
• Italian Poetry: In the sixteenth century, Petrarchism spread rapidly throughout Europe. In 1526, a meeting took place in Granada, Barcelona between the poet Juan Boscán and Andrea Navagero. Navagero encouraged Boscán to introduce Italian themes and forms into Spanish poetry. Boscán sought advice from his friend Garcilaso de la Vega, and both undertook the same task. Garcilaso fully realized this poetic revolution. In the works of these two friends, we see the introduction of certain meters: sonnet, Petrarchan song (several stanzas in heroic verse and seven-syllable), chained triplets, ottava rima, and lira (a combination of heroic verse and seven-syllable, usually five lines).

They created a poetic world in which nature provided an idealized bucolic framework—the locus amoenus. And in that world, the hendecasyllable became the most suitable instrument, together with the seven-syllable verse, for the genres of classical origin that were introduced at that time: the epistle, the eclogue, the elegy, and the ode.

Garcilaso de la Vega

Garcilaso was born in Toledo around 1501. He is the prototype of the Renaissance man: a brave warrior and a great poet. His career can be divided into three stages:

• The Influence of Hispanic Poetry: Garcilaso’s work shows literary reminiscences that connect it to the poetry of the songbooks. There are also clear traces of Ausiàs March.
• The Assimilation of Petrarchism and the New Art: The influence of Petrarch on Garcilaso was decisive and consistent. From him, he took meters, stanzas, themes, and images. Garcilaso was surrounded by humanists and poets whose influence led him to look back to the classics.
• Fullness: Following the death of Isabel Freire, Garcilaso wrote some of his most beautiful creations, marked by great emotional intensity and a total assimilation of classicism.

Garcilaso’s work was brief, like his life. He composed three eclogues, two elegies, one epistle, four songs, the “Ode to the Flower of Cnidus” (which introduced the lira), thirty-eight sonnets, and eight songs in Castilian verse.

In Garcilaso’s sonnets and songs, the Petrarchan style is combined with the rhetoric of love and the topics of the song lyric. The elegies, meanwhile, are a clear sign of the influence of the classics.

The eclogues are Garcilaso’s most important works. An eclogue is a poetic composition in a bucolic tone in which two shepherds converse, usually about love. Garcilaso composed three.

The Poetry of the Second Renaissance

Poetry followed the paths of the Italian style marked by Garcilaso. The two main influences of the moment were Petrarch and Horace.

Petrarchan poetry, more sonorous, bright, and sensual, had its greatest exponent in Seville’s Fernando de Herrera. His style is characterized by color, brightness, and elaborate language.

Horatian poetry, more serious and intense, had as its main representative Fray Luis de León. The favorite verse form of this type of poetry is the lira, which combines hendecasyllables and heptasyllables, giving the poetry great expressive agility.

Religious poetry is the expression of the soul’s union with the divine. Its chief representative is San Juan de la Cruz.

Poets are often grouped into two schools:

• The Castilian or Salamanca School: Their language is brief and concise. Fray Luis de León belongs to this group.
• The Seville School: They preferred themes of love, formal ornamentation, and rhetoric. Fernando de Herrera belongs to this group.

Fray Luis de León (1528–1591)

• Original Poetry: It consists mostly of odes (compositions of short stanzas and an indefinite number of verses). The topics are varied, but all are modeled on Horace, from whom Fray Luis took the beatus ille theme (the praise of the simple life and retirement).
• Translations of Classics
• Bible Translations: Fray Luis translated the Song of Songs, some passages from the Book of Job, and several psalms into the vernacular.

Religious Poetry: Asceticism and Mysticism

During the reign of Philip II, “sacred” versions of existing works appeared, based on the theme of love, with changes to encourage devotion and moral teachings in readers.

Asceticism and Mysticism

Asceticism and mysticism are two branches of theology that claim that it is possible for the human soul to achieve union with God before death. Both are an Itinerarium mentis ad Deum (“path of the mind to God”).

• Asceticism seeks to perfect people through a life of struggle and sacrifice. The most important works are written in prose, and key authors include Fray Luis de Granada and San Juan de la Cruz.
• Mysticism aspires to the soul’s union with God. This process takes place in three stages or paths: the purgative (the soul is purged of earthly attachments), the illuminative (the presence of God is felt), and the unitive (the mystical union of the soul with God). Key figures include San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Jesús.

San Juan de la Cruz (1542–1591)

In prison, he wrote his three fundamental mystical poems:

• Dark Night of the Soul: A poem composed in liras, which tells how a young woman leaves home dressed up to meet with the Beloved (God), to whom she surrenders.
• Spiritual Canticle: A dialogic poem written in liras, in which a shepherdess (the bride) seeks her shepherd (the bridegroom) to be united with him. The poem is an adaptation of the Song of Songs and, like the previous one, is accompanied by a prose commentary that explains the process of the illuminative and unitive ways.
• Living Flame of Love: Also written in liras. This is an ode that describes the poet’s amorous feelings upon uniting with God.

Santa Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582)

Her works include The Book of Life, The Interior Castle, and The Way of Perfection.

Renaissance Prose

Idealized Novel

Chivalry

• Popularity among the nobility
• Great success
• Were read aloud
• Amadis of Gaul
• Palmerín of Oliva
• Palmerín of England

Pastoral

• Idealized world
• Bucolic (Eclogues)
• “Diana” by Jorge de Montemayor
• “Diana Enamorada” by Gil Polo
• “La Galatea” by Cervantes

Moorish

• Battles between Moors and Christians
• Idealized characters (especially the figure of the Moor)
• “The Abencerraje”

Italian

• Very short stories
• “El Patrañuelo” (Timoneda)

Byzantine

• Long journeys around the world
• “The Persiles”

Features

• Flat characters (prototypes)
• Unreal world
• Idealized landscape

Realistic Fiction

Picaresque

• Anonymous
• Characters (children of outcast parents)
• Alternating luck and misfortune
• Criticism of society (through different masters)
• Real environment
• Introduction of infrarealism (antihero)
• Logical ending
• “El Primero”
• “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes”
• “The Life of Guzmán de Alfarache”
• “The Swindler”
• “Rinconete and Cortadillo”

Features

• Round characters
• Real world
• Detailed landscape
• Logical ending

The Picaresque Novel

With the publication of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554 began one of the most representative genres of Spanish Golden Age literature. The picaresque is understood as a reaction against the idealized characters of the chivalric and pastoral novels; it presents a very real and unheroic protagonist.

It has the following characteristics:

• Autobiographical form: It is the rogue who recounts his own wanderings.
• Open structure: The novel is composed of loose scenes in different places with different characters, whose only connection is the rogue.
• Determinism: The rogue’s parents belong to the lower social classes.

Lazarillo de Tormes

Publishing and Authorship

It was written after 1525, possibly in the years close to its printing. The author of this work is unknown.

Biographical Structure: The “Letter” of Lázaro

The novel consists of a prologue and seven treatises. The novel is structured from the end, as the episodes serve to justify the present situation.

Realism and Folklore in the Novel

Lazarillo de Tormes marks the beginning of the realistic novel. The author places his characters in a real setting, in real scenarios. The story of Lázaro is the story of an “educational process”: a child who, as he matures, reacts to external pressures and builds his personality.

The gallery of main characters is a synthesis of the Spanish social scene in the second quarter of the sixteenth century: the beggar, the man of the church, and the vain poor.

The novel also includes many elements of folk origin: most of the tricks and deceptions are stories that belong to tradition, but the author tells them as part of the protagonist’s life.

Honor and Religion

The author satirizes the humanist debate on honor and virtue. Although the author defends the supremacy of personal merit against lineage, he shows that social mobility does not exist. Lázaro has achieved some material prosperity, but that prosperity has cost him his personal and family honor.

The anticlericalism of the novel is clear: of Lázaro’s new masters, five belong to the ecclesiastical establishment (although only its lower strata). The second, the priest of Maqueda, is so greedy that when he celebrates Mass, instead of serving the holy sacrifice, he is watching Lázaro’s hands for fear that he will steal some money.

This anticlericalism has been explained from different perspectives. Some scholars have argued that the work is by a convert who denounced the spiritual climate of the time. Others have seen in the novel’s anticlericalism the censorship of someone close to Erasmianism.

Style

The language of the novel maintains a balance between colloquial speech and the educated norm.

The basic background of the language of Lazarillo de Tormes is provided by the speech of Toledo, and the author gives an important place to proverbs and popular expressions.

Lazarillo possesses a quality that meant it was almost half a century before a second picaresque novel appeared: “Guzmán de Alfarache.” But the picaresque novel developed mainly during the seventeenth century.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: A Versatile Writer

Miguel de Cervantes cultivated all genres:

Cervantes, Poet

Cervantes’s poetic work can be classified into two groups: one that follows typical Renaissance models like Garcilaso de la Vega or Fray Luis de León, and the ballads and songs closer to tradition.

His most extensive work in verse is “Journey to Parnassus.” This is a long poem written in triplets. It presents a naval battle between good and bad writers.

Cervantes, Playwright

In Cervantes’s stage production, it is necessary to distinguish two phases:

• The first, from which most works have been lost. In the preface to his book entitled “Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes, Never Performed,” the author says that by 1580 he had already composed some twenty or thirty works. Of these, only two have survived: “The Treatment of Algiers” and “The Siege of Numantia.”

The plays are usually classified according to their subject:

• Comedies of Moorish atmosphere: “The Baths of Algiers,” “The Great Sultana,” “The Gallant Spaniard”
• Comedies of intrigue: “The Entertaining One”
• Comedies of manners: “Pedro de Urdemalas”
• Comedies of chivalry: “The House of Jealousy,” “The Labyrinth of Love”
• Plays of saints: “The Fortunate Ruffian”

Cervantes achieved his greatest success with interludes, short pieces written in both verse and prose, which follow the tradition of Lope de Rueda. In them, the author presents a humorous portrait of the society and customs of the time. The most famous of the interludes is “The Altarpiece of Wonders.” Other interludes include “The Election of the Mayors of Daganzo,” “The Ruffian Widow,” “The Jealous Old Man,” “The Feigned Biscayan,” etc.

Cervantes, Novelist

Cervantes is primarily known for his narrative works.

• La Galatea is a pastoral novel consisting of six books. The main action is simple: Elicio, a shepherd from the banks of the Tagus, is in love with the shepherdess Galatea. Her father, Aurelio, wants to marry her to Erastro, a rich shepherd. Elicio gathers all his friends to ask Aurelio not to marry Galatea to Erastro. This story is accompanied by other secondary ones featuring other shepherds. La Galatea contains all the typical ingredients of the pastoral: idealized country life, characters dressed as shepherds and poets, and a love story as the narrative framework.
• The Persiles is a Byzantine novel. It chronicles the adventures of the protagonists, children of the Queen of Thule and the Queen of Finland, respectively. After touring northern Europe, they arrive in Lisbon and travel through Spain to reach Rome, where they marry. This is a complex plot full of shipwrecks, kidnappings, wars, piracy, and other adventures.
• The Exemplary Novels, what we now call novellas. These include “The Gypsy Girl,” “Rinconete and Cortadillo,” “The Illustrious Scullery Maid,” and “The Dialogue of the Dogs.”

The novels can be grouped into two categories: realistic and idealistic.

Don Quixote: A Universal Work

Structure of the Work

Don Quixote was published in two parts:

Part One is entitled “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.” It recounts Don Quixote’s first two outings: in the first, Don Quixote is knighted by an innkeeper and returns home after being beaten; in the second, Don Quixote seeks a squire, Sancho Panza, and together they travel through La Mancha to Sierra Morena. Interspersed are short stories unrelated to the main plot, such as “The Ill-Advised Curiosity,” the tales of Grisóstomo and Marcela, Cardenio and Lucinda, Dorothea, etc.

Part Two is entitled “The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha.” It tells of Don Quixote and Sancho’s third outing. The protagonists head to Aragon and Catalonia. Much of the narrative takes place in the palace of a Duke of Aragon, who recreates the world of chivalry to play a joke on Don Quixote and appoints Sancho governor of an island. The protagonists return home after Don Quixote is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon (a villager in disguise). There, the protagonist dies. The interpolated stories disappear in this part, where the characters and their dialogues are the focus of attention.

The Characters

• Don Quixote: A complex character. His madness is limited to the chivalric world; outside of it, he shows great wisdom, tolerance, and generosity.
• Sancho Panza: A character who evolves throughout the novel. He leaves home out of greed but becomes fully integrated into his master’s world of adventures. His wit, wisdom, and practicality are sharpened.

Don Quixote and Sancho represent two ways of being. Their dialogue is the channel through which they influence each other until they reach a full exchange of personalities. These two characters are accompanied by others, representing a broad spectrum of the society of the time. Among them is Dulcinea, who exists only in Don Quixote’s imagination.

The Style of Don Quixote

Don Quixote features a wide variety of styles that fit the characters and situations: from Don Quixote’s rhetorical tone to Sancho’s more colloquial language. The characters are characterized by their speech.

Humor and irony are very present in the work. Cervantes uses puns, distortions, mimics the language of books of chivalry, etc. There are also many proverbs, initially characteristic of Sancho’s language but also used by other characters.

Part of the complexity of this novel is based on the narrator and the game of perspectives that Cervantes uses. The work begins by offering the story of Don Quixote, based on data that the author has collected in the archives of La Mancha. In chapter eight, this document is abandoned, but Cervantes says that, by chance, he found an Arabic manuscript containing the continuation of the story. Its author is Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab. Cervantes hires a Moor to translate it, and therefore, the text we read is a translation of the original. This trick allows Cervantes to comment on his own work.

Interpretation

The intention of Don Quixote is, according to Cervantes in the prologue, to parody books of chivalry. Besides being a humorous novel, Don Quixote is a work of literary theory and criticism that judges the fashionable genres of the sixteenth century. It also portrays society and the crisis of the time.

Renewal of Baroque Poetics

Baroque Poetic Renewal

During the first third of the seventeenth century, a first generation of poets developed who completely revolutionized the preceding artistic conception.

The most characteristic feature of seventeenth-century literary style is a general tendency towards what has been called the art of difficulty.

These features were implemented in two Baroque aesthetic trends, both in poetry and prose:

• Conceptismo was based on wit and acuity of concept. It was also characterized by the intellectual achievement of concentrating meanings. Quevedo is one of the leading representatives of this trend.
• Culteranismo, also called Gongorism, sought to create an elevated poetic language, highly formal and ornamental, far removed from everyday language and characterized by the frequent use of Latinate language and mythological allusions. Luis de Góngora is one of the leading representatives of this trend.

Luis de Góngora: Life and Characteristics

The characteristic features of Góngora’s poetry are:

• Pictorial sense
• Landscape
• Musical sense
• Cultism and popularity
• Satire and panegyric

Technical and Poetic Language

The most characteristic features of Góngora’s language are the use of learned words and a Latinate and hyperbatonic syntax.

• Learned words: Words of Latin origin
• Hyperbaton: Disruption of normal sentence order

Poems of Culteranismo

He wrote many sonnets, a form whose technique he mastered. His major works are his poems “Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea,” “Soledades,” “Panegyric to the Duke of Lerma,” and “Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe.”

• Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea is a mythological poem in ottava rima (eight-line stanzas of heroic verse with the rhyme scheme ABABABCC), based on a passage from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” It tells the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who is in love with the nymph Galatea. She, in turn, is in love with Acis. When Polyphemus discovers them, he throws a rock at Acis and crushes him. Acis’s blood turns into a river. This composition is full of learned words, metaphors, hyperbaton, adjectives, and hyperbole.
• Soledades is a lyric poem, composed in silvas (a mixture of heroic verse and seven-syllable lines) with consonant rhyme, with the tone and scope of an epic poem. It is a hymn to nature and rural life.
• Panegyric to the Duke of Lerma was written upon Góngora’s arrival at court, where his fall from grace did not allow for a valid political statement. It is composed in stanzas and was left unfinished, probably due to the Duke’s death.
• Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe is a burlesque mythological poem. It combines his desire for culteranismo with a taste for the popular. It is written in the quintessential popular rhythm of the romance.

Francisco de Quevedo: His Work

Quevedo, Poet

Topics

• Metaphysical poems
• Moral poems
• Religious poems
• Love poems: Quevedo’s love poetry is characterized by a renewed approach to the Renaissance love lyric. He took Petrarchan images and motifs and transformed them with hyperbole, metaphors, and personifications.
• Satirical poems: Much of Quevedo’s work, both in prose and verse, is marked by a satirical-burlesque tone. Satire served Quevedo to express his bitterness and disappointment, while allowing him to develop his linguistic games.

Quevedo, Prose Writer

• Picaresque novel: “The Swindler,” belonging to the picaresque genre, is Quevedo’s only novel.
• Moral-satirical works: “Dreams,” “Time for Everything,” and “Fortune with Brains.”
• Political works: Quevedo’s political writings occupy a very large part of his literary work. His most important and extensive treatise is “Politics of God, Government of Christ, and Tyranny of Satan.”
• Philosophical and ascetic works